Hi I'm looking for app suggestions having failed to find what I need on a trawl of the App Store. I manage about 15 staff and would just like a app to record attendance, sickness, training and appraisal dates. Because of the business I'm in I need to be able to configure the training records and create my own categories. Effectively I'm looking for a more user friendly (for me) spreadsheet or database. Any ideas - several apps I found were more focused on a sales environment and discipline issues which didn't really help as my business is more akin to field engineers working on their own and I need to ensure that training up to date before I send them out.......

There is always Numbers, Apple's spreadsheet app. There's even an attendance template you can use as an example. And, of course it will use iCloud to sync between the iPad and iPhone. Numbers also allows you to create Forms for easy entry of data.

The downside is that you have to do the grunt work of making your own spreadsheets, though you might luck out there too. If you search the web for iWorks Numbers templates you'll see quite a few sites. Hold in mind that templates made for the OS X (desktop) version of Numbers may or man not work on the iPad. Not all features can be imported.

FormConnect is another specialty database app that many people recommend. I'm not familiar with it myself, but you might want to look into it. It appears to be mostly form based, so taking attendance and other task-check-off jobs may not work well with it.

HanDBase is another general purpose database app. I know even less about this one, but it's probably the most powerful/useful database available for the iPad at this time; FileMaker having end-of-lifed the Bento application.

If you do choose Numbers, or some other iCloud syncing app, I recommend you also save/backup your documents to another source as part of your daily routine. iCloud is meant as a quick syncing method between devices. This means it updates very fast. If bad thing happen to your documents on one device or in the cloud, they will quickly spread to all other devices and/or the cloud.

It only takes a few seconds to save a document to another cloud service such as DropBox or Box.com. I do this every time I update a document I consider important. Well, in my case I don't really have any important documents, but I do have a few that it would really irk me to lose or have to re-enter days of lost data.

Well, don't take my response as meaning the app(s) you want arn't out there. I gave general function app recommendations because that's all I know about, but it isn't like I've been actively searching for the app(s) you want, and there is a an awful big pile for apps to hide in.

As long as we are talking spreadsheets, I should probably also mention Google Drive (Documents). While nowhere near as fancy, you can create spreadsheets and have access on both the iPhone and iPad. It is also (like Numbers) possible to create forms for data entry. The form creation process is more flexible, in ways, but the forms are web based. You basically go to a special site and fill out the form in Safari. You can visit the form site as often as you like, each visit creates a new row of data.

The main strength of this method is that you can send the link to others and have them fill out their own data.

The main weakness is you'll need to use a computer for the initial setup. The Google Drive iPad app only gives you the basics of spreadsheet creation and editing.

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